Tuesday, February 3, 2009

P&L 692 Assignment 4

-It offers a manual, Quick Tour for Beginners that provides the basic training.

-Interface languages –English, German

-It is useful for discourse analysis and ethnography. However, it may not be effective for mixed method research.

2.ATLAS.ti’s operations are also described as embodying a 'V

ISE principle', that is:

Visualization: largely through offering the network view, but also by enabling the indexing of pictures and other graphical objects;

Integration: all primary documents, codes, memos, quotations, etc., are kept within one 'hermeneutic unit' - the focus of analysis, which may be a set of interviews on a topic, the open question responses from a questionnaire survey, a set of organizational documents, or whatever.

Serendipity: standing for '...an intuitive approach to data', that is the ability to browse primary documents, quotations, codes, etc., all within the same unit and thereby happening upon relationships that one may not have seen previously.

Exploration: 'Through an exploratory, yet systematic approach to your data as opposed to a more "bureaucratic" handling of data it is assumed that especially your theory building, constructive activities will greatly benefit.'

ATLAS.tihandles multimedia data in a way that is useful for the analysis of this kind of data, as they allow for the coding of video and audio sequences. The features available are:

linking to multimedia files; coding parts of pictures; coding/transcribing of video/audio data, but inconvenient Window handling; and handlings of compressed files that are supported by Windows configuration.

5. Various search types available

Simple searches retrieve text strings and/or codes from data. Frequently, the search results can be displayed in their context.

Boolean searches offer various combinations of searches using the Boolean operators AND, OR/XOR, and NOT across various sections of codes or texts. (codes: AND, OR, NOT)

Proximity searches are similar to Boolean searches. These searches allow you to retrieve combinations of two or more text strings and/or codes, which occur in a definable proximity to each other. (codes only)

Combination searches allow you to combine any of the above searches with Boolean operators. (flexible, but with respect to codes)

6. Coding is easily done in ATLAS.ti. As with earlier versions of ATLAS.ti, codes, memos, hyperlinks, and even networks can be created on the fly and associated with elements of the text as small as individual letters, words, phrases, and sentences, right up to the HU itself.

The coding features that ATLAS ti offers are:

In vivo codingIn vivo coding means to assign the text that is to be coded to a code, whose label is the text itself. While this is a very efficient method for coding, there might be theoretical consideration to use this option cautiously.

ATLAS.ti allows for the visualization of theoretical models among variables/codes in diagrams. Itoffers the by far most flexible model editor, which allows you to customize the types of linkages between codes. It is also the only editor that actually links the codes among each other via hyperlinks.